The Day of the Locust (film)

Infobox_Film
name = The Day of the Locust


caption = Original poster
director = John Schlesinger
producer = Jerome Hellman
writer = Waldo Salt
starring = Donald Sutherland
Karen Black
Burgess Meredith
William Atherton
music = John Barry
cinematography = Conrad L. Hall
editing = Jim Clark
distributor = Paramount Pictures
released = May 7, 1975
runtime = 144 min.
country = flagicon|United States
language = English
amg_id = 1:12625
imdb_id = 0072848

"The Day of the Locust" is a 1975 American drama film directed by John Schlesinger. The screenplay by Waldo Salt is based on the 1939 novel of the same title by Nathanael West. Set in Hollywood, California just prior to World War II, it depicts the alienation and desperation of a disparate group of individuals whose dreams of success have failed to come true.

ynopsis

The film offers a dark, cynical look at Hollywood in the late 1930s and tells the tales of several of the residents of the dilapidated San Bernardino Arms: Faye Greener, a trashy wannabe actress with limited talent, and her father Harry, a former vaudevillian working as a door-to-door salesman; sexually repressed accountant Homer Simpson, who desperately loves and is fanatically devoted to Faye; and East Coast WASP Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist employed by the production department of a major studio, who also fancies Faye. It is filled with unusual and often bizarrely disturbing
harem girl in old Baghdad; a dwarf strokes a rooster, bleeding and dazed from a cock fight, then tosses it back into the ring to its death; an androgynous child standing on the sidewalk beckons to a man through a window and performs a grotesque imitation of Mae West once his attention has been caught. These brief vignettes do little to advance the basic plot, but they serve to comment on the sleaziness of Hollywood and its varied inhabitants. Spectacle fills the screen - a set of the Waterloo battlefield collapses on the extras during the making of the film within the film, and in the film's climax, a world premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater evolves into a horrific riot culminating in gruesome tragedy.

Principal cast

*Donald Sutherland ..... Homer Simpson
*Karen Black ..... Faye Greener
*Burgess Meredith..... Harry Greener
*William Atherton ..... Tod Hackett
*Geraldine Page ..... Big Sister
*Richard A. Dysart ..... Claude Estee
*Bo Hopkins ..... Earle Shoop
*Pepe Serna ..... Miguel
*Lelia Goldoni ..... Mary Dove
*Billy Barty ..... Abe Kusich
*Jackie Earle Haley ..... Adore
*Gloria LeRoy ..... Mrs. Loomis
*Jane Hoffman ..... Mrs. Odlesh
*Norman Leavitt ..... Mr. Odlesh
*Madge Kennedy ..... Mrs. Johnson

Critical reception

In his review in the "New York Times", Vincent Canby called it "less a conventional film than it is a gargantuan panorama, a spectacle that illustrates West's dispassionate prose with a fidelity to detail more often found in a gimcracky Biblical epic than in something that so relentlessly ridicules American civilization . . . The movie is far from subtle, but it doesn't matter. It seems that much more material was shot than could be easily fitted into the movie, even at 144 minutes . . . It is reality projected as fantasy. Its grossness — its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences." [ [http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A07E2D71E3EE53BBC4053DFB366838E669EDE "New York Times" review] ]

Jay Cocks of "Time" said, "The Day of the Locust" looks puffy and overdrawn, sounds shrill because it is made with a combination of self-loathing and tenuous moral superiority. This is a movie turned out by the sort of mentality that West was mocking. Salt's adaptation . . . misses what is most crucial: West's tone of level rage and tilted compassion, his ability to make human even the most grotesque mockery." [ [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,917442,00.html?promoid=googlep "Time" review] ]

Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" called it a "daring, epic film . . . a brilliant one at times, and with a wealth of sharp-edged performances," citing that of Donald Sutherland as "one of the movie's wonders," although he expressed some reservations, noting, "Somewhere on the way to its final vast metaphors, "The Day of the Locust" misplaces its concern with its characters. We begin to sense that they're marching around in response to the requirements of the story, instead of leading lives of their own. And so we stop worrying about them, because they're doomed anyway and not always because of their own shortcoming." [ [http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19750523/REVIEWS/505230301/1023 "Chicago Sun-Times" review] ]

In the "Chicago Reader", Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film as "a painfully misconceived reduction and simplification . . . of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood . . . It misses crucial aspects of the book's surrealism and satire, though it has a fair number of compensations if you don't care about what's being ground underfoot - among them, Conrad Hall's cinematography and . . . one of Donald Sutherland's better performances." [ [http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/2474_DAY_OF_THE_LOCUST.html "Chicago Reader" review] ]

Channel 4 calls it "fascinating, if flawed" and "by turns gaudy, bitter and occasionally just plain weird," adding "great performances and magnificent design make this a spectacular and highly entertaining film." [ [http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=102602 Channel 4 review] ]

References

External links

*imdb_title|id=0072848|title=The Day of the Locust